Kerouac at Columbia!

I got a book a month ago called "The Beat Generation In New York". Its a NYC guidebook of 9 walking tours focusing on the history of the Beat writers...mostly Jack Kerouac. Today i followed one of these tours...loosely. I spent the day hanging out in and around Columbia with my little guidebook reading about Kerouac and his buddies' college years.

I didn't follow the tour point by point (who really needs to see the facade of an apartment building). But the exercise of walking tours gives you a feeling of the scene and in my case a feeling of nostalgic attachment with those writers, those places and those stories. I went to school about a mile south of Columbia but lived in 3 separate apartments on the westside above 100th street, so I do have a personal history there as well.

Its a bit funny to me that the Beat writers went to such a stuffy University. But i guess it is just a reminder that most of the writers from that era were in fact from wealthy families and their Dharma-Bum reputations were the design of a conscious effort to strip themselves of their privilege...or at least take their clean-cut past to rebel against.

Years later in 1959, when the Beats were formally recognized and had become controversial literary figures, they were invited to speak to an overflowing audience at Dodge Hall, they had fully realized their dirt-of-the-earth aesthetic. In a scathing review of the evening the wife of Ginsberg's Professor Lionel Trilling wrote, "I took one look at the crowd and was certain it would smell bad." Certainly a notice a rebellious poet could be proud of!

At Columbia, Kerouac met Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, Hal Chase, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many others. This group was the core of what became the Beat Generation. Their heavy literature background, mixed with normal collegiate rejection of authority and a heavy dose of the dark side of life (i.e. murder, drugs, jail) and a world ready for a little post-war social upheaval, and the rest is history.

Walking through Columbia with my handy guidebook, I saw:

• St. Paul's Chapel where Lucien Carr told Kerouac and Burroughs that he had just stabbed David Kammerer, a known stalker of Carr's.
• Hamilton Hall where Ginsberg wrote graffiti in the dirt on his windows...and act that got him expelled.
• Hartly Hall and Livingston Hall-buildings that Kerouac lived in.
• 114th and 115th street-streets that the group lived on and wrote about extensively. 114th is a street i was once nearly attacked by a drunk who tripped over a fire hydrant while running to grab me.

The group hung out often at a local pub "The West End", a bar I often frequented at roughly the same age as Kerouac. A different bar in the 1990's where i would go every weekend to watch a friend's Jazz quintet, Ginsberg remembers the stiff moralled Irish bartenders that thought all students were communists. HA!

Walking these street without a story, I guess is just a walk. A walk that most of us do everyday. With a story or 10, a walk can be thousands of times more fulfilling. New York is full of stories. They are everywhere. Today was fun, because i could compare a few of my own stories with a few of more historical importance. Kerouac wrote about 115th street imagining himself walking down the street years later:

"In years to come I shall walk down this street, this stage, and look at it in retrospect. It shall not then be a part of the present, but a reminder of the past to me. I shall value it and love it for what it once meant."

Well said Jack...the perfect sentiment for my day and my Farewell Tour.